Media Industry Archive

With General Motors and Chrysler both once again being on the brink of something very bad, thought it was time to look at just how much money would come out of the traditional advertising marketplace if the two, pun intended, tanked — and how much has already come out, given that GM and Chrysler have supposedly been in a milder version of cutback mode for some time. Here’s a BNET Media...

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If you happen to be a doctor, every time someone meets you at a party, the chances are good that he or she will ask you about some weird symptoms they have been having lately. Naturlly, you get sick of it, but it comes with the territory. Me, every day somebody asks me how this whole media industry mess is going to turn out. Will serious journalism survive; what about investigative reporting?...

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Strange to read about Microsoft’s plan to close Encarta today, if only because I can’t think of the last time that Encarta even entered my mind, and as a blogger, I’m a particularly heavy user of research resources. Wikipedia so dominates the top links in most categories that sources that used to pop up frequently, like Encarta and the good ol’ Encyclopedia Britannica...

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It would be hard to find two items that, when juxtaposed, better capture the zeitgeist in the media industry than these two from this morning’s emailbag: 1. Metro USA, which publishes daily titles in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, has terminated its contract with the Associated Press effective April 1, 2009.  Jim Romenesko reports in his Poynter blog: “As an international...

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The full-year interactive advertising spending numbers are in, and they’re up! … but not by as much as they might have been had Lehman Brothers not folded and brought the entire universe down with it. Here’s the topline from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which hires PricewaterhouseCoopers on a quarterly basis to gather and number-crunch blind ad revenue numbers from the...

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HuffPost creates “investigative fund” — The Huffington Post has set aside $1.75 million to fund long-form investigative journalism. The money was raised along with Atlantic Philanthropies and will fund text, video and interactive stories. All content will be “open source” and available to be published anywhere for free. The Huffington Post will allocate the money...

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As you may have noticed, we’ve been having loads of fun here at BNET Media regarding Sci-Fi Channel’s, um, interesting decision to rename itself SyFy. The new name — which some have compared to a certain sexually-transmitted disease  — has met with puzzlement, to say the least. As this post at News.com described it: “There has been something of an outpouring of bile...

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It’s Sunday. This is not really a media industry post.  But I just want to note that our energy industry blogger, Chris Morrison has placed high on list of the top 50 energy blogs, as determined by The Fixer-Upper Blog. The Fixer Upper describes itself as a blog covering a range of issues of concern to homeowners, including finance, energy, technology, home ownership and maintenance....

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While the tsunami sweeping through the newspaper world grabs most of the headlines these days, there is an equally dire crisis besetting the magazine industry. According to eMarketer, a stunning 525 magazines folded in 2008; with another 87 already shut down during the first quarter of this year. Even though I’ve covered some of this wreckage, especially the troubles at the newsweeklies,...

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To close out the week, thought I’d post this dead-on animated sketch about Twitter from Current TV. It’s caught on this week, to say the least. When I first streamed it on YouTube on Monday, it had about 350,000 views. Now it’s just under a million. Best line: “It seems like Twittering is just randomly bragging about your unexceptional life.” Yeah. You might think...

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